Rebecca Horn

"Rebecca Horn is a real pioneer in art by virtue of her multiformity, elasticity, and status as a technical polyglot. But also and above all by virtue of the manner in which she holds together the countless threads of her work, and the way in which she has always developed the theme of the exile from the fable, of that moment in which the fairy within us loses her magic before the onset of madness, becoming a mirage. And on careful thought, while this mirage and this delicate equilibrium do represent the relationship with ourselves and the world around us, they also reflect most of all the relationship dearest to us: that between two people. That often treacherous and illusory--and yet indispensable--dimension, that complete expression of the body and of imprisonment, as well as of freedom. That ultimate expression of the heightened sensory state, and that of the necessary dose of illusion that lies at the heart both of every form of mental love and every form of physical eroticism." Angela Vettese, excerpted from her foreward to Fata Morgana.

The Maribor Project was part of the European Capital of Culture events in Maribor, Slovenia, in 2012 and took place at Umetnostna Galerija Maribor (UGM) over one and a half months. The project focused on the exhibition of some of Rebecca Horn's most acknowledged works, chosen by the artist and comprising installations, mechanized sculptures and drawings. Horn also selected works by key contemporary artists-Matthias Deumlich, Ali Kaaf, Antonio Paucar, Jakob Schaible and Markus Wüste-to participate in an international dialogue at UGM. The event was accompanied by poetry readings by Rod Mengham, Tomaz Salamun, Joachim Sartorius and Yang Lian, a roundtable discussion with Horn and Ale? ?teger, a concert by Hayden Chisholm and a film presentation. For a moment, the intercultural and interdisciplinary approaches of both the exhibition and the Maribor Project managed to break down the divisions between disciplines and cultures. The artistic diversity, the specific political, social and historical references to Slovenia and the aesthetic relationships between the diverse works on display allowed visitors to explore the complex ways in which art deals with philosophical approaches to life and death, love and hatred, and the inner and outer worlds.

Published by Hatje Cantz.Text by Rebecca Horn.

Rebecca Horn (born 1944) is famous for her performances, films, drawings, photographs, installations and sculptures. Over a period of two decades she has also produced a body of poetry. This publication brings together writings dispersed throughout previously published catalogues alongside unknown texts dating from 1972 on.

Rebecca Horn is always open to new methods for generating art. In recent years she has combined painting and photography to produce “photo-painting,” in which overpainted photographs are rephotographed, overpainted again and photographed again, in a wild dialogue between spontaneity (paint) and document (photography) that erases or obscures the finality of each successive gesture. “For me, the process of photo-painting is more about writing in a variety of rhythms, from tiny dots to scattered paint that spreads in all directions to swiftly touched marks,” Horn testifies. In Fata Morgana she combines photo-paintings with films produced for two cinematic-operatic works, The Deadly Flower and Fata Morgana. In the latter, Horn's photo-paintings abstractly extrapolate the opera's impassioned narrative as it is replete with bloodshed and lunacy, enacting visual narratives in collaboration with the music. Fata Morgana beautifully records this latest development in Horn's work.

German-born artist Rebecca Horn has, since the early 1970s, been engaged in a diverse and prolific practice. Her process-oriented performances, films, sculptures, installations, drawings and photographs are, literally or metaphorically, extensions of the body--and often serve as mechanical replacements for it. Referencing mythical, historical, literary and spiritual imagery, Horn invokes these bodily concerns with such objects as violins, ladders, pianos, feather fans, metronomes and drawing machines. She is best known for works like "Pencil Mask" (1972), which looks like an instrument of torture, but which actually transforms the wearer's head into an instrument for drawing; and "Unicorn" (1970), a performance in which the artist transforms herself, by means of a prosthetic horn, into an awkward version of the mythical creature. This exceptionally printed volume contains a concentrated collection of Horn's drawings and includes an essay by German art historian Doris von Drathen.

Drawing has always been supremely important to me, Rebecca Horn said in an interview a few years ago, likely surprising many readers. Rebecca Horn: Drawings, Sculptures, Installations, Films 1964-2006 brings together a wide-ranging collection of the artist's works on paper, many produced in conjunction with her early performances. Along with props, they reveal the intense physical and mental work that went into the aesthetics of those pieces. A selection of diagrammatic representations also illustrates Horn's strategies in placing machines and equipment from films in exhibitions, where they took on a life of their own. The book also includes scores, technical designs and evidently spontaneous drawings, many of which are enriched with collaged objects, printed words and lines of poetry. This first publication devoted to a previously largely overlooked group of works provides an excellent survey of Horn's graphic art.

Published by Holzwarth Publications.Artwork by Rebecca Horn.

The first in a planned series of postcard books, Rebecca Horn: 10 Works/20 Postcards presents works by one of the most highly regarded installation artists active today. Ten of Horn's iconic pieces, mainly sculptural installations, are shown here--each captured from two different angles. This book can be perceived as a publication in its own right, or as a complement to previous publications. But, of course, it also offers itself as a collection of postcards in the classic sense: as a thing of beauty to be passed on to others.

Published by Holzwarth Publications.Artwork by Rebecca Horn. Contributions by Hayden Chisholm.

In 2004 Rebecca Horn created “Light Imprisoned in the Belly of the Whale,” a work that incorporated passages of poetry as a sculptural element within a room-filling installation of words and sentences projected onto a black, reflective sheet of water. Horn's collaborator on the project was the New Zealand-based composer Hayden Chisholm, who infused the pictorial space with sound, lending an acoustic dimension to the poetic narrative. The artists have collaborated on other projects, including Spiriti di Madreperla (2003) and Moon Mirror (2004). Music for Rebecca Horn's Installations gives those who witnessed Horn and Chisholm's collaborations an opportunity to re-live their visual and acoustic experience. This publication consists of two CDs in plastic sleeves with recordings of Horn's poems for Spiriti de Madreperla and Moon Mirror, which are set to music and sung in several languages. A 16-page booklet depicts the installations in color photographs, and includes 2 CDs.

Rebecca Horn gained international recognition with her mechanical objects and mobile sculptures, among them such works as Paradieswitwe, Spiralbad, the wall drawing Les Amants, produced as part of an action, and her expansive Circle for Broken Landscape. The light-and-sound installation Lumi¿re en prison dans la ventre de la baleine and Yin Yang, a work created especially for a Dsseldorf exhibition, evoked striking atmospheric effects. The significance of this representative survey of Rebecca Horn's work--featuring some 25 installations and objects from the past 35 years--is emphasized by its juxtaposition with a selection of roughly 75 works from the artist's copious graphic oeuvre. Horn has been making drawings since the 1960s, as preliminary studies for her sculptures, as complementary treatments of sculptural themes, and as completely independent works. Her musical scores, technical drafts, and drawings are done in a remarkably calligraphic style and are frequently accompanied by words and lines of poetry. Body Landscapes offers readers an unprecedented opportunity to reconstruct the intense and fruitful dialogue between Horn's graphic works and her objects.

Published by Hatje Cantz.Essays by Doris von Drathen and Stephen Henry Madoff. Preface by Marion Ackermann.

Moon Mirror focuses on a singular aspect of Rebecca Horn's extraordinarily diverse oeuvre, one that plays an important role in the formal constitution of her large sculptures and installations: the relationship between the work of art and its architectural setting. Presented here is a range of pieces, from early works of the 1970s to sculptures and installations realized in 2003. In Mekasten and R‚ume berhren sich in Spiegeln, both made in the 70s, the human body is the measure of spatial perception. In the late-80s installation Das gegenl‚ufige Konzert, Horn worked site-specifically within a building of dubious political background--the Zwinger, where countless people were tortured during the Nazi regime--exploring its history and creating a place of remembrance. In the recent Moon Mirror, a work installed in Pollen°a, Majorca, the artist created a column of air between a fountain constructed of mirrors and an eddy of light beneath the dome of the Stiftskirche. At the point at which the Orient and the Occident meet, the moon is captured as a "vehicle of human vision and expression." The viewer descends into the depths of the fountain and transcends her own horizon in order to survey the heavens anew.

Published by Hatje Cantz.Poetry By Jacques Roubaud. Music by Hayden Danyl Chisholm.

In 1997 French poet and mathematician Jacques Roubaud wrote 53 poems for Rebecca Horn. Inspired by this poetry, the German artist created sculptures of light in which words wander through dark spaces, weave through murkiness and form an intertwined network, a firmament of text. In a bath of black water, the poems reflect each other, dissolving within the waves, allowing new signs to arise. A song sung in dialogue with a whale, composed and performed by New Zealand-born jazz musician Hayden Danyl Chisholm, accompanies these visual transformations. This elegant volume contains the work of all three exceptional artists, with Roubaud's lyrical texts written in their complete format; Horn's piece represented in installation photographs; and Chisholm's composed, congenial sequences recorded on audio CD.